37 Responses to “might just be one SUPER BUTCH LESBIAN”

“So I’ve been going through a “weird time” lately concerning my sexual identity and my gender. I’ve seen like first-hand the “effects” of top surgery and uhhh it doesn’t appeal to me in particular (I don’t hate my BOOBS anymore!) I’m glad I realized this before I went any further with the T because I feel like I really need to figure myself out a little bit more before I do anything crazy like that again. I’m far more attracted to lesbians than straight women and YES I do still bind (I don’t pack) but I think that’s mostly because it just makes my shirts look better haha. I don’t like to hang out with guys and do typical “manly things” lmao I’d rather go to the mall. PLUS I get way more lesbians than straight girls and I like it that way :p I don’t care what people call me he/she, shelby/carter – I really am just indifferent to be quite honest. I guess I might just be one SUPER BUTCH LESBIAN…but who knows haha. I mean it’s just not worth it to me to “be stuck in between.” I don’t want to legally change my name or get any type of surgery or even ever take anymore T ever again. I’ll keep y’all posted on what’s going on in my confused as all hell mind, PEACE!”

I sure as hell hope she STAYS a Butch Lesbian! She’s cute! Her hair is just right(mine is shorter), and I wouldn’t say she’s ‘super Butch’, just Butch…..a baby Butch! She NEEDS Butch Dykes like us around who are PROUD of our Female Bodies, and our Lesbianism. I no longer ‘pack’ either! And she could have any number of Lesbians, Butch or Femme who would give her attention and a date, and still be herself without having to carve up her body or take deadly hormones! I also commented on her youtube video too, in support. I loved when she said she was attracted to Butch Lesbians and wanted to emulate them NOT straight men!

We’ve GOT to get Female Proud Butch groups going, so just these types of women can come back into the Butch Lesbian fold, and not go down the path of carving up their bodies, fucking up their minds, and identifying as male and as the oppressor, and feeling shame if they should have FEMALE FEELINGS, or WANT to be with Lesbians instead of straight women. Besides most straight women want a REAL MAN, a bio male, NOT a trans!

I feel so strongly about this, saving this next generation before they go down that path, to fucking up their Female Butch Lesbian bodies/minds and spirits, cuz all their peers are doing so! This is where we gotta come out of the woodwork in FULL SUPPORT of them!
-FeistyAmazon

i’ve had top surgery and taken t and i’m starting to regret transition but i have no one to talk to and there are no dykes where i live. i mean i still look relatively female because i get ‘ma’am’ a lot. i dunno what to really do right now, who can i talk to?

For what it’s worth, good friends are far more useful than most Trans* support sites. There are a lot of people out there who try to validate their own existence and others by encouraging others to follow in their footsteps. It’s about what makes them happy, what’s not right to you.

Testosterone is a powerful drug. Over time, it leads to facial hair, permanently deepened voice. If you’re not sure about staying on it, then it would make a lot of sense to take a step, reevaluate, see if you can get what you need to be happy – and healthy – without transition. It’s a large price to pay.

A physician can help you get off the Testosterone. There can be mood swings, depression, etc.

This is the only body you have – if you get off the T, and decide that it really is the only option for you, you can always go back. The longer you stay on the T, though, the fewer choices you have.

I once thought transition was my only option. I realize now that it wasn’t.

She reminds me of myself as a young person, and thank goddess the mind-virus of trans wasn’t available to women then. And I have to dissent about the “butch” thing. When I was her age, I was just a dyke and tomboy, I never got the label thing. And at the risk of pissing some people off, I’ll share that the older I got, the less “masculine” shtick I cultivated. Labels, whether trans, butch or anything else, confuse people and cause them to do awful things like surgery and hormones to make permanent something that could be just a phase of late adolescence.

Ordinary tomboys like Shelby are being prevented from seeing how ordinary they are. In my day, people like her were just the average baby dyke, and you didn’t have to figure anything out. What I want to know is, who is deliberately infecting healthy young women with this horrible mind virus.

I looked at an earlier, pre-t vid of hers, which only confirms my impression that she isn’t necessarily butch. In her intro video from 6 months ago, she seems very young, so T aged her. Also, she looked like she was wearing lip gloss, not sure, but seriously, I would never in a million years read this girl as butch. There is nothing wrong with butch, but the problem here is that it’s now possible to medically freeze a young person in what could be a phase. I don’t want to use a politically incorrect word like “outgrow,” but if adolescents are encouraged to adopt a label and then make it physically permanent, how will they be able to outgrow what could be a phase or could be really who they are? We don’t know. All I know about this girl is that she is very young, much too young to commit to a label. Kids her age should be told that they’re kids and their job is to experiment, not commit. For all I know, she could grow up to be a soccer mom, a femme lesbian, or anything, really. Everyone should compare the new video to her 6 month old intro video, to see what labels and T hath wrought.

Interesting. Thinking about it, it seems there are two trends going at cross-purposes, almost – on the one hand, there’s this push for everyone to be super-special snowflakes and what seems very individual, but on the other hand, there’s this push to CATEGORIZE yourself, to figure out precisely which of the 31 flavors of ice cream you are, but then to commit firmly to that flavor, forevermore, obeying all of its myriad rules. It’s all about “identity” but it’s really never any individual person’s identity, it’s some narrow box that has a group in it to which you must conform.

All of the “figuring something out” that people speak of doing, similarly, it’s about choosing this box, this “identity” that you’ll define yourself by forever.

Why do that? Why not just say, well, I’m me, and that’s it? Seems that is the more “daring” thing to do?

It makes me so sad that people are trying to figure out their “gender identity” by exploring their *sexuality.* We need to keep these preferences separate because it just adds to I-dentity confusion and emotional angst. I think it’s a BIG problem.

Exactly. Every time I find a video on-line from one of these younger kids — or of the parents of kids with supposed GID — they quickly fall into conflating biological sex, sexual orientation and culturally-enforced gender roles.

I just want to holler: “Liking knitting and eye-shadow doesn’t make you female. Being sexually attracted to females doesn’t make you male. Wanting a motorcycle or a leather jacket doesn’t make you male. Being sexually attracted to males doesn’t make you female. Aieeee, people! Stop it!”

I can understand it in the kids. Obviously they’re very confused by their crazy culture, but I am horrified when I hear so-called adults in their thirties say something along the lines of, “My 13-year-old daughter is romantically attracted to one of the girls in her school, and she’s always liked to wear jeans and boots and play with “boy toys” like Lego and matchbox cars, so obviously she’s really a straight male trapped in a female body.”

People, people, people. She’s 13. Let her know that you’ll always love her, no matter what her sexual orientation. Then back off and let her be 13.

Even those one would expect to know the difference do not; multiple-degreed medical professionals who work on so-called “feminist women’s issues” and facilitate panty busting workshops for males under the auspices of national women’s health issue funding. (I have it in writing.)

I couldn’t get the video to work, but I would not call her “super Butch.” Most F2Ts or those who go in that direction are not Butch. Many are het woman or Fem.

Feral, Butch is the opposite of masculine. “Femininity,” as the trannies keep showing, is a very male/masculine invention and not at all about being female. The reason some of us identify as Butch is to share support about being marginalized and oppressed in patriarchal culture as well as in Lesbian communities. We are the ones who grew up never fitting in because we insisted on being what I think all females would be if it wasn’t for pressure to “feminize.” We said no to men, even though we usually had no one else like us in our families, schools, neighborhoods, etc. We are also the bottom of the Lesbian heap because of refusing to fit in with the male rules of “femininity.” The more any women are made “other” by male standards, the more those are who not extremely male-identified feminine feel they don’t belong — which is why some women are lured into the trans cult. Butches are even censored from mainstread media like films and television because we so threaten patriarchy, so many women have no idea of even what a Butch is.

Bev Jo, I understand some of the subtleties of the real, political meaning of butch, but Shelby is a confused and abused teen, and she doesn’t actually know anything about politics or labels, except what she gets from her “friends” on tumblr and youtube, the same “friends” who gave her T. Regardless of the real meaning of butch, to people who have lived it, it’s a historical fact that when I was a baby dyke in the 70s, people read me as butch because of my “masculinity,” in the same way people would read Shelby. If a tumblrized, youtubed and facebooked girl has to pick a label, it may not even mean the same thing to her as it does to you. If I could tell young people one thing, it would be, anyone who thinks you need a label doesn’t know you.

Fuckin A. I see no difference in parsing this young woman’s “degree of butchness” and calling her trans. It’s all such utter crap. I never considered myself “butch”. But everyone else (who doesn’t consider me a failed-to-launch “trans man”) does. Fuck that. I’m a perfectly average female- who happens to display non-traditional female characteristics. I do use butch as a descriptor – because what else do we have? But really, it is total shit. I would rather be considered an average typical woman- a really butch-ass one. Okay that made no sense but you know what I mean.
The key point to remember is the next time someone comments on the degree of “butchness” of this young woman I WILL SCREAM. And I GET the conversation, I really do. Many many times I have PRIVATELY puzzled with my friends about women who describe themselves as “butch” yet wear “laydee jackets” and shave their “laydee hair” etc. Or who think butch is a “style” like a short haircut. Word up: a butch with long hair wearing a dress is clockable as a butch. A butch naked is clockable as a butch. A butch with your eyes closed is clockable as a butch. A butch is a woman who has rejected femininity since it was first inflicted on her as a child, to a greater degree than most women. Parsing “degrees of butch” is fun for private gossip. And it is irritating when flamingly feminine women decide to adopt a “butch persona” as if it were fashion. But really, who gives a shit. If you are widely shunned since birth for performing “female” incorrectly, you are butch. If you adopt a certain presentation (haircut, etc) because you want to be unconventional or fashionable to your target audience you are something else. And it can be irritating to those who have no CHOICE. But really who the fuck cares.
This comment is not directed at Shelby. She is fine whatever descriptors she wants to use, butch, whatever. Like many (most?) young lesbians her rejection of sexist stereotypical behavior has her peers, the world-at-large, the media, the psychiatric and medical communities clamoring for her “correction”. THAT IS WHAT MATTERS. And THAT is THE PROBLEM, the SEXIST, HOMOPHOBIC, FEMALE-HATING MALE-SUPREMACIST PROBLEM facing our young lesbians today.

I know what you’re saying, but wasn’t talking about Shelby since I couldn’t see the video. I was trying to counter the stereotype of Butches being “male” or “masculine,” which is insulting to us, and to you in the past. It’s the superficiality of reading any female who refuses to obey male rules of false “femininity” as being, ironically, male. It’s like if you don’t look like a drag queen, you get called “sir” in stores.

It’s as important to stop identifying the least male with male terms, as it is to refuse to use female pronouns for men masquerading as females.

“It’s as important to stop identifying the least male with male terms, as it is to refuse to use female pronouns for men masquerading as females.”

Very well said.

One of the ironic results of me completely rejecting the whole “all women will spend thousands of dollars of their hard-earned cash in the beauty parlor each year” edict: I now have very, very long hair. I had it buzzed off years ago and haven’t stepped foot in a salon since.

Does rejecting salons make me more masculine? Does growing my hair out make me more feminine? Was I butch when I had it buzzed but now I’m femme?

Wait! What? I’m just…me. A real biological female, not a patriarchal stereotype of a “femme”.

I think it is a symptom of a wider problem. There are sub-sections of the young/er lesbian community where trying ‘T’ is considered in the same light as maybe sharing a joint or a cigarette or something. We already know that drug and alcohol addictions are a problem in lesbian and gay communities; I think the ‘T’ culture is really just the latest manifestation of that. This time supported by our lovely learned medical community.

The question was probably rhetorical anyway…but yeah…Thinking about ‘T’ in terms of drug habit and drug culture is enlightening, for me anyway.

I’ve heard older trans people thank younger ones for validating their choices, for “reminding” them why they did it in the first place. So many are looking for validation, and convincing another can be it’s own form of validation.

All too often, they take vulnerable people and use them to feel better, never stopping and asking what’s in the other person’s best interest.

That video was cute and she is adorable. I’m praying a ton of self acceptance comes her way.

“I do still bind” caught my attention and made laugh. Well yeah, so does just about anyone with breasts! They get in the way! They make your clothes fit wrong. Some women can completely ignore them, but the rest of us have all sorts of bras to keep them out of the way or in place or from knocking us in the chin all the time.

They also attract the male gaze, which is often unwanted by heterosexual women, so I imagine it’s really a drag for lesbians. I spent most of my young life wrapped in a heavy ski jacket trying to avoid it. It’s like being stamped USDA choice and being placed in a meat market. It’s not that I don’t identify as a woman, it’s that I don’t identify as a chuck roast.

“It’s not that I don’t identify as a woman, it’s that I don’t identify as a chuck roast.”

LMAO!!! I hear you loud and clear. Even as an older adult I had a job where I felt the need to wear bra, opaque blouse or sweater, winter-weight blazer/jacket AND scarf to work every day just to be able to speak to my boss without getting raked over with his hot, pink little piggy eyes. I didn’t last very long at that job.

As hard as it was for me, a bisexual woman in my 40’s, how much harder is it for high-school aged lesbians?

Not really butch, just confused. But looks like a dyke to me, who is coming out of the whole trans cult. Seems she couldn’t do the FTM catechism, but she’s still stuck with the usual daft ideas around gender (like shopping has anything to do with anything!).

Love that, yttik, about the chuck roast! I really agree. I’m horrified seeing women on TV exposing their artificial breasts. How can any girl grow up feeling okay about things growing on her body that change how she is looked at and treated? Yes, they do get in the way and do alter how clothes fit, and, in my strange mainstreaming Lesbian community, almost everyone wears bras now. I haven’t since I was a teenager. They are uncomfortable and seem to make breasts more noticeable.

But too bad there aren’t support groups for dealing with the stress of having objectified female bodies in patriarchy, rather than support to take toxic hormones and have surgery. Whether it’s unneeded mastectomies or breast implants or stomach damaging or labiaplasty other horrific plastic surgeries, that’s become the mainstream patriarchal answer to female-hating.

Yes, the pressure IS like Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gallus. I think the more they recruit, the more they can drive away being aware that what they are doing to themselves and other women is just wrong and damaging.

I agree, weirdward, that it IS addictive also.

Unfortunately, this cult seems to be much more public than community support for young Lesbians and Lesbians of all ages (since a lot of older Lesbians have been “transitioning” also. Lesbians have almost nowhere left to go really, no female-only space. I keep seeing the fuss made over women who use male pronouns. They are talked about with an awed whisper. With awareness, I see them as traitors. I feel sympathy for those who have been alone in all this and especially for those reconsidering. A strong, supportive, Radical Lesbian Feminist community is the best antidote.

I left a message of support to Shelby as well. She seems to have a really good grasp of who she is (more than she seems to realize), and I just hope that that’s not drummed out of her by the trans cult. I feel so protective of that kid, even though I don’t even know her.

For those of you looking to be either amused or perhaps horrified, depending upon your mood and/or point of view, this:

Yes, Gallus, I wasn’t sure how much to say here, but do want you and all to know how very loved and appreciated you are, and wishing you and your loved ones the best. I know so many who don’t post here who talk about you with such love and appreciation. Your reach of love and defense for women and Lesbians goes further than any of us know!

As someone who “never performed femininity properly,” this video just makes my guts ache. Who on earth is telling these young women — at this late date, no less — that femininity, nay, even womanhood!, is so small they can’t fit into it and must therefore *perforce* be men?

I grew up in the 1970s, and was the type of little girl who said, “Oh, yuck, a doll, just what I never wanted!” at a company Christmas party, but thank goodness my mom and dad were feminist enough to let me do my own thing and not try to turn me into a brunette Barbie doll. Horrifying!

I have an idea why many young women who transition didn’t “look” particularly butch to begin with. See, when I was a little kid, I had parents who told us when young girls that it didn’t make a difference to them if we grew up to be lesbian, or whatever. My dad, for his part, endorsed more feminist ideas than my mom did, and when talking to us about relationships and sex, told us that if a guy we were with didn’t reciprocate sexually that he needed to know that it’s not acceptable, and to dump anyone who was selfish in bed and didn’t change his tune rapidly. I didn’t get flak for hating dresses (except when my mom wanted me to wear a dress for picture day in kindergarten), or liking cars, or wanting a tarantula as a pet instead of a hamster, rejecting make-up, refusing hair spray, for expressing a crush I had on a girl in class when I was eight, or when I came out in high school.

But one thing I definitely absorbed shame about was looking too “masculine”. When I was little, I wanted my hair cut short, because brushing my hair was so painful and time-consuming (especially since like my dad I am autistic, and especially sensitive to touch). I got the ever-so-subtly concerned reply: “But not TOO short, right?” My dad had expressed his confusion at lesbians who use dildos or partner with butch lesbians: “Why get with a fake man?” That is an extremely common attitude, and girls learn that one of the worst things they could grow up to be is “fake men”. In ftm communities (I am a former ftm who did not at all “look butch”), it is oft repeated how well ftm’s pass, and no one has any idea they’re trans unless told. So even though ftm’s know that society at large would mostly regard them as fake men if they knew, they will be treated like a male by the stranger on the street. So gender forces a false dichotomy on us: either be an “appropriately feminine” woman, be a reviled “fake man”, or become a “real man” through transition.

Another thing is the lack of female characters in TV and movies. Few women and girls in such media are portrayed as whole, heroic human beings. In an action save-the-world movie, it’s exceedingly rare to see a woman as the hero – she’s instead the girlfriend, the platonic friend, the mother, the wife, whose importance is typically defined by her relation to the man. Almost all the characters on TV I identified with were male. The only exception I can think of is Helga, from Hey Arnold. While she rejected “prim and proper” and acting like a delicate, passive flower, her main role in the show is her obsessive crush on the main male character, Arnold. When you’re always relating to the male characters, and the same trend occurs in real-life (where you relate to the males in your life more than the females), it’s easy to think your brain is just wired more like those of men’s. Especially in my case, where Simon Baron-Cohen’s “Extreme Male Brain Theory” of autism was beginning to get popularized during the early part of my puberty. Hey, if an extra amount of fetal testosterone gave me a more male-typical finger ratio, probably contributed to my being autistic and lesbian, maybe that extra testosterone also gave me a male brain. My mom and her mom also had uterine tumors, which can be a sign of excess testosterone and is correlated to a greater likelihood of having an autistic child.

I’m glad the Youtuber featured is coming to be at peace with the fact she is female. When I was 11, I started to realize how much more difficult it was for me to relate to my fellow girl scouts (I had been in GS since I was 6 or 7). They were talking about boys, and clothes, and they saw a big difference between various shampoos whereas I saw none (still don’t, except for scented vs. unscented – the latter of which I didn’t know existed). They were absorbing more of the cultural messages about how to do femininity, whereas I, for the most part, didn’t. Partially because I’m autistic and a lot of social messages go over my head unless someone points them out and explains carefully, so I just saw us becoming more and more different, and not sure why. All I saw was I was different from the other girls. Different from the boys, too, but on a social level, in terms of preferred activities and topics of conversation, I was far closer to the boys I knew than the girls.

There was a study (from the Netherlands I think), from a gender clinic, where the children and adolescents in the study with GID were about 7 times more likely to have an autism spectrum diagnosis than the general population. That’s certainly significant, if replicated anyway. I think it’s because a lot of the subtler social messages (including those around gender) go over our heads growing up, so we act more androgynously on the social level, getting much less of the indoctrination sinking in. Then, we look around and see the differences, and see we relate more to group X than Y. Also, autistic people tend to like rigid rules, because the world is so messy and complex it’s overwhelming, and the more we can reduce the complicated social and sensory worlds to simplified, general rules, the more we can engage with those systems, whereas ordinarily it would be too complex and overwhelming to engage at all. So when we go asking questions and seeking answers about our differences to others in our sex, we get a bunch of simple, generalized stereotyped rules about the ways men and women are which we need to study and do careful introspection to figure it out. The same thing as happens to NTs, but it tends to happen to autistics later, when social understanding starts to catch up a bit, and after we have grown into a less-gender-dictated personality.